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| Palm Sunday "Entry to Jerusalem |
To make sense out of the triumphal entry to Jerusalem, with people throwing clothes and palm fronds for a donkey to trample on, I would first explore our addiction to hero worship. I would search the week's news for some examples of hero worship: most likely in a sports story, perhaps in a political or business item. I would talk a little about how we seek to borrow glory by attaching ourselves to someone who embodies the virtues we covet. I would take them back to their childhood or youth – and retell a story in which someone wields exceptional powers to make things work out: Cinderella's fairy godmother, Superman's powers, Batman's technology, Aladdin's genie... That was the kind of heroic saviour that the Jerusalem crowds expected. (See excerpt from Last Chance, below). But Jesus disappointed them. He deliberately chose to disillusion them, to de-illusion them, by riding on a donkey. Unfortunately, even the humble donkey tends to get glorified – partly because of Zechariah's prophecy that a king would come riding a donkey, but even more because of association with Jesus riding on it. To bring imagination back to earth, I could point out that Eeyore, in A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh stories, was a donkey. I might read an excerpt that portrays Eeyore as always gloomy, plodding, a little dim... And that humble beast was what Jesus chose to ride. Rather than Jesus exalting a humble beast, the beast dramatizes the humility of Jesus. He was deliberately saying, to the people of his time, and to ours, that humility is the antidote to our obsession with power. Excerpt from Last Chance: The Final Week of Jesus' Life, (Wood Lake, 1989, pages 21-27) Then as now, people thought in power terms. They suffered from what I sometimes call the “Superman Syndrome.” They expected the Messiah, the Saviour, to act like a fairy godmother and make things right by waving a magic wand. Zzzap! – everything's fixed. Fairy godmothers and Superman belong in children's stories and comic books. But the pattern of thinking persists in adults. Adults wouldn't dream of asking a boss to “kiss it better”... but they still buy lottery tickets, hoping that unearned wealth will solve their problems. Or they elect a handsome but vacuous politician to restore national prosperity. Or they beg a charismatic television evangelist to cure their cancer. In Jesus' time, people expected their promised Saviour to drive the hated Roman army out of their territory, and to restore Israel to the glory it had known, briefly, under David and Solomon... But Jesus came riding on a donkey, not a war-horse. Almost anywhere in the world, the donkey is a symbol of humility. They're beasts of burden. Women ride donkeys; men feel humiliated if they have to ride on a donkey. If they can't have a horse, they'd rather walk! In his final week, his last chance to get his message across, Jesus must have despaired of mere words. So he decided to act out his message in ways that his disciples could neither mistake nor forget. He chose to ride a donkey when he entered Jerusalem. The Bible contains no other record of him riding on an animal of any kind. That in itself would make this a memorable event. The idea of humility, of being less than one was entitled to be, turns conventional wisdom upside down. One is expected to aspire to greater things, not lesser ones. But Jesus consistently set an example of humbling himself. He played with children, treated women as friends, and associated with lepers and tax collectors. But his two most dramatic demonstrations of humility came during the final week – when he rode a donkey, and when he rode a cross. In the stories of Palm Sunday, we place too much emphasis on the triumphal entry, and not enough on his choice of a mount. In concentrating on the roar of the crowd, we distort the message he intended. We glorify popularity and social approval. The procession celebrates pomp and pageantry. It turns his enacted parable into precisely the kind of triumphant military parade that riding on a donkey was supposed to contradict. The choice of a donkey tells us that God's way is peace, not war. Humility, not power. Service, not status. JIm's full List of suggestions for preaching these stories
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